Square Enix is suing a group of 15 "Italian nationals" for leaking a preview build of Deus Ex: Human Revolution to torrent sites a couple of months ago, reports Kotaku. Word is: "As part of court filings issued last month in Washington, Square Enix accuse the fifteen of logging into the servers where the demo was hosted using the access information of an Italian games magazine (GMC), where they found the preview build of the game, copied it and uploaded it onto the internet."

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Jerykk wrote on Jul 7, 2011, 12:18:Your points seem a bit silly. For one, you don't actually have to play a game in order to steal its ideas. Anybody who's watched videos or read previews can do the exact same thing.

No, they don't. You might want to do a bit of research on reverse engineering and how memory dumps/footprints or analyzing file structures and formats etc. is going to take things to a whole new level for someone in the know. It's one thing to look at something and to find it cool but it's a totally different story to figure out how to do (or imitate) it properly.

Nothing DX:HR does is particularly innovative. It's not the first game to combine stealth, action and dialogue, nor will it be the last. Even if there was an idea that another developer stole, there was only a few month gap between the leak and DX:HR's retail release. It's not like you can make a AAA game in less than three months. As for dissecting the game and stealing code, there's only so much you can do without the source code. And the game is going to use Steamworks, which has already been cracked countless times.

A head start is a head start and any serious game developer is going to burn mucho dinero even in just three months. I never said that anyone would code a full game in three months. Stop pulling stuff that I never said out of your ass, kthx.

Also: The positive reception of the leak alone is a very valuable information asset for third parties (and thus a potential problem for Square Enix). It is true that other games have combined stealth, action and dialogue but some games worked for the audience and some games didn't. It seems like DXHR is going to be one of the working cases. That info alone is worth a lot because it's going to make copying the essentials much easier. I'm almost tempted to bet real money that some Eastern European or Russian devs are all over the DXHR leak already to produce one of their infamous clones.